ZAGREB, Croatia — Zagreb has 23,400 apartments that nobody lives in, according to figures the city published on Thursday, the first hard count produced by a property tax that Croatia introduced in 2025 to push empty homes back onto the rental market.
The tax, which ranges from 0.60 to 8 euros per square meter a year depending on the municipality, applies to homes that are not a primary residence and are not rented on a lease of at least 10 months. Zagreb set its rate at the maximum. The 23,400 units identified in the city represent 6.1 percent of its housing stock and would, if occupied at the city’s average household size, house about 55,000 people, roughly the population of Varaždin.
“For 30 years we argued about empty apartments without knowing how many there were,” said Ivana Horvat, a deputy finance minister who oversaw the tax’s rollout. “Now we know. The next question is harder.”
The next question is whether the tax is doing what it was designed to do. Zagreb’s rental listings rose 9 percent in the year after the tax took effect, and asking rents, which had climbed 60 percent since 2019, were flat. But the city also collected 31 million euros from owners who paid rather than rent, suggesting that for many, the levy on a 60-square-meter apartment, about 480 euros a year, was a cost worth absorbing.
Tomislav Babić, 67, owns two such apartments in Trešnjevka, inherited from his parents and kept, he said, for grandchildren who live in Germany and visit in August. “I paid the tax,” he said. “Eight euros a meter is not nothing, but it is less than a tenant who stops paying and takes a year to evict.” Croatia’s eviction proceedings average 14 months, among the longest in the E.U., a fact that landlords and tenant advocates cite with equal frequency and opposite conclusions.
Petra Jurić, who leads a tenants’ association in the city, said the tax was too low to change behavior and called for it to triple. “The point was not to raise money,” she said. “The point was to make keeping an apartment empty feel like a choice rather than a default. At 480 euros a year, it is still a default.”
The city council will debate the rate in November. Ms. Horvat said the ministry would resist proposals to turn the tax into a penalty. “There is a version of this that works and a version that sends every second apartment into a cousin’s name,” she said. “We have seen the second version in other countries. We would like to try the first one for longer than a year.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 6 of the European edition with the headline: Zagreb Counts 23,000 Empty Apartments as Croatia’s New Property Tax Takes Hold.
